


The Angels of History

by weakinteraction



Category: Star Trek
Genre: F/F, Stranded, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-26
Updated: 2021-01-26
Packaged: 2021-03-12 11:28:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,098
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29009796
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/weakinteraction/pseuds/weakinteraction
Summary: Two women, each on their own missions to preserve the timeline, collide ... literally.
Relationships: Michael Burnham/Seven of Nine
Comments: 8
Kudos: 8
Collections: Past Imperfect Future Unknown 2020





	The Angels of History

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kira_katrine](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kira_katrine/gifts).



Michael looked out at the wormhole's maw, her vision blurring with the hyper-relativistic shift of the photons streaming from it.

No, it was _her eyes themselves_ that were blurring, the spacetime that they were embedded in being distorted, pulled unnaturally into new shapes and forms.

The suit would protect her from the worst effects, just as the enhancements they had made to _Discovery_ 's shields would protect the crew. Michael suppressed the urge to cry at the thought of the sacrifice they were all making alongside her.

She had made her decision: it was simple, in the end. If the alternative to taking the sphere data into the far future, leaving everything she had ever known behind, was the end of everything she had ever known, and everything else as well, then simple logic dictated that the needs of the many outweighed the needs of the one. But she had not accounted for the human factor: that _the one_ might become _the few_.

And so now, behind her, instead of the ship, empty except for the sphere data, were her beloved friends, taking this giant leap into the unknown with her.

The wormhole stretched out all around her, the distorted images at its sides carrying to her glimmers of the light of centuries she had never seen, and never would see, only the tiniest fraction of the photons escaping into the locally flat, traversable spacetime of the wormhole itself: the geometry was carefully designed to keep almost all particles from interacting with the suit. Michael stared out, finding wonder even in this act of desperation.

Until, suddenly, alerts were going off all over her heads-up display: chroniton levels were rising rapidly. That shouldn't be possible, not here inside the wormhole, not this tightly directed, nor this coherent--

* * *

\--nor this large. Certainly not this ... physical.

A blonde woman wearing something that was unmistakably a Starfleet uniform, even though it didn't match any she had ever seen, was wrapped in her arms, as though she had tackled Michael to the floor.

And there _was_ a floor. Or rather, a ground. Michael quickly took in the situation: a valley on a planet with a lavender-pink sky and at least three small moons.

So many questions: where was she? _When_ was she? Who _was_ this and what had she been doing in the wormhole, somehow? And behind those questions and half a hundred more, a drumbeat at the back of her mind saying: _The mission has failed. The future is doomed._

Michael pushed that thought away, as hard and as far as she could, and focused on what was right in front of her. Which wasn't any useful information: the heads up display of had gone completely dark, and the suit wasn't responding to any of her attempts to rouse it. If it was rebooting, it was taking a long time about it.

Michael wrestled with the manual overrides for the helmet.

"You are human," the woman said, on seeing her head fully for the first time.

"You look awfully human too," Michael said, "considering that you first showed up on my sensors as a stream of chronitons."

"I was mid-temporal-transport," the woman said. "The annular confinement beam must have intersected with your primitive suit in such a way as rematerialise me." Michael thought that she must have still have been looking stunned, as the woman went on, "You are familiar with transporter technology, I take it?"

"Yes, of course," Michael said, gathering her wits. "But I've never heard of a temporal transporter."

"Nor had I," the woman said, perhaps a little ruefully, "until I was beamed up one onto a timeship five centuries ahead of my own time."

"Sounds like you have quite the story to tell."

"Indeed," the woman said. "As must you, considering that you are in possession of a ... what, precisely?"

"Red Angel suit," Michael supplied.

"What is the significance of this designation?"

Well, there was a question and a half. But now wasn't the time to talk about the way the Red Angel -- the way her mom and she herself -- had woven itself inextricably into both her families' lives. "It's a little more poetic than 'temporal transporter', I'll grant you that," Michael said.

"Poetry is irrelevant."

* * *

They swapped their stories: stories that, in each of their cases, turned out to need more stories to be told to explain them.

Seven turned out to be a human, as Michael had initially surmised, but one who had been rescued from a hive mind called the Borg -- whose goals and methods sounded disconcertingly similar to Control's -- by a Starfleet ship stranded in the _Delta Quadrant_ , more than a century beyond Michael's own time. And, although Michael had been right about the uniform she was wearing, she wasn't in fact a member of Starfleet: that was a disguise worn on a covert temporal mission she had been assigned by the people of the _twenty-ninth_ century.

As for Michael's own story, the fact that it came as a surprise to Seven's apparently encyclopaedic knowledge at least meant that their efforts to hide their existence from the records had been successful. _Discovery_ had remained so completely secret that none of the Starfleet crew ever "assimilated" by the Borg had been aware of it.

* * *

"There is only one logical conclusion," Seven said when they had considered everything from every angle, and the red sun was low in the sky. "If the timeship _Relativity_ was still in existence in the current timeline, I would have been beamed away immediately."

"That's not logic," Michael said. "That's despair." But that drumbeat she had pushed to the perimeter of her mind was still there, and part of her feared that Seven was right.

"There is one course of action that may prove fruitful," Seven said. "We must repair your 'Red Angel' suit."

"On a planet with no technology? Maybe even no sentient life at all? How do you propose to do that?"

"You have no evidence for these surmises," Seven said. "We may be in a nature reserve on a highly advanced planet in a time beyond your own. Tomorrow, we shall explore."

"Tomorrow?"

"It is clear that your physiological requirement for sleep will impede our efficiency," Seven said. "I myself will suffer increasingly over time from being unable to complete my regeneration cycle in the optimum way. We must balance these competing demands."

* * *

They explored the planet -- if they were in a nature reserve, it must have been continental in size, and have no visitors at all.

Seven was determined that the suit could be repaired, even if they would have to create extractive industries from scratch. She was carrying a very compact phaser, which helped a little, but Michael thought her schemes were little more than make-believe. She might have access to the knowledge of the entire Borg collective, but that didn't mean they had the resources required to implement it.

Michael went along with her efforts anyway. It was better than just giving up, and Seven even said that they worked well together, doubtless, Seven said, the result of her Vulcan upbringing leading her to be more rational than most humans.

Michael decided to take it as a compliment.

* * *

Michael got used to Seven not wanting to make small talk. However hopeless the mission at hand seemed, she was focused on it -- Michael could relate to that well enough -- but there was more to it as well. It wasn't simply that it was inefficient, it was becoming clear that Seven didn't know _how_.

So it was a surprise when one night, around the hearth they had made, it was Seven who began the conversation. Even more so when it seemed to be about emotions. "You do not fear me." Seven sounded slightly incredulous.

Michael couldn't keep the incredulity out of her voice. "Am I supposed to?"

"In my native time, those who learned that I was a Borg drone were ... disconcerted. At best." She looked thoughtful. "Even the crew of _Voyager_ took time to ... adapt."

"Do you miss them?"

"They were often maddeningly irrational," Seven said. "And unpredictable. And yet I do find that I miss the stimulation."

"I'm not stimulating enough for you?" Michael said lightly.

The catch in Seven's voice when she said, "I ... did not say that," was intriguing enough. But the hand on her arm -- the first time they had touched except for the occasional brush of hands against each other as they passed one another equipment -- was something else again. "What about you? Do you miss the crew of _Discovery_?"

"Every single day," Michael said with feeling. She looked into the fire, saw the flames dancing, and tried not to think of the futures full of ashes she had seen in her mother's logs.

And then she wasn't looking into the fire any more, because Seven had put her hand to Michael's cheek to draw her towards her for a kiss, and Michael was kissing her back, and ...

* * *

It took months, but they were, in the end, able to repair the suit. When it finally started, a stuttering "Re-re-re-reboo-ting" suddenly replaced with the oh-so-calm computer voice, Michael whooped for joy and hugged Seven, who allowed herself a satisfied smile.

It turned out that they were all the way back in the 10th century, on a planet in the Gamma Quadrant. But that barely mattered now, with the suit they could go anywhere and anywhen.

Or at least, one of them could.

"I'm not going to leave you behind, Seven," Michael said when Seven laid out what she believed the logical course of action was. The worst of it was that Michael knew it wasn't only logical, it was _right_. Only a grotesque monster could think that their strange not-quite-paradise was worth sacrificing the entire future for.

"That is an inaccurate characterisation of what would occur," Seven said. "I will be beamed back up by the _Relativity_ , once it exists again."

"You cannot be certain of that," Michael said.

"You are right, I cannot," Seven said. "Perhaps it would be best to rest and reflect and make a decision in the morning."

"You mean we should sleep on it?"

They did get to sleep ... eventually. Their lovemaking that night was bittersweet, tinged with the awareness that the situation had changed, that they might be about to part ways.

But when she woke up next morning, Seven was nowhere to be seen.

Nor was the suit.

* * *

Michael looked out at the wormhole's maw, the future ahead of her, _Discovery_ behind.

For the briefest moment, she thought that some sort of strange effect of the wormhole was causing her to see another version of herself in the suit ahead; instinctively, she swerved to avoid. By the time she realised it was probably some sort of strange effect of the discontinuities in the space-time metric, or maybe even a sensor glitch, she was already plunging forward into the wormhole proper.

* * *

_As the timeline restored itself, changes rippling through from one century to another, a Federation timeship reappeared in its rightful place in history, the only indication of anything amiss only a momentary glitch in the systems, its true cause undetectable even to the ._

_On the bridge, Lieutenant Ducane looking at his superior officer. "I'm sorry, Captain Braxton," he said. "Seven of Nine's pattern appears to have lost cohesion."_

_"Damn," Braxton said, balling his fist. Then he exhaled. "Oh, well, we'll just have to recruit her again."_

_"This will be the third time, sir," Ducane pointed out._

_"Just do it, Lieutenant."_

_"Of course, sir."_

* * *

Seven of Nine breathed hard inside the suit. She had succeeded. The tiniest diversion to Michael's course on entering the wormhole -- such as that she had caused -- would mean that she would never intersect her transporter beam in the first place: her mission would succeed, the timeline from which Seven herself had come would be saved, and this version of her would cease to exist, replaced by one who had been successfully beamed to her destination.

Seven waited, pondering the implications of the fact of her continued existence for how changes to the timeline propagated -- knowledge she knew she would never be able to share before she popped out of existence.

As the time wore on, she had to consider a new hypothesis: perhaps the suit had insulated her from the ramifications of her actions on wider history.

The history that Michael had told her had contained two Red Angels: Michael herself, and her mother Gabrielle.

Seven smiled to herself as she realised that this new history would have a third.


End file.
